


phosphenes in our starry eyes today

by Adversarial



Category: Eddsworld - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neon Genesis Evangelion Fusion, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Ballroom Dancing, Childhood Trauma, Codependency, Destruction, Di said "hey but what if TomTord PacRim AU" and four thousand words later we've got this shit, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Giant Robots, Homoeroticism, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Mind Meld, Monsters, POV Alternating, Post-WTFuture, Shooting, The Drift (Pacific Rim), i had no idea how to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:33:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27813847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adversarial/pseuds/Adversarial
Summary: When you settle into the jaeger with him, it's a homecoming you never wanted.The cockpit is as small as ever-- he'd built it with one body in mind originally, when he'd used it to smash your old life to splinters under his metal fist-- and between your body and his body and your respective flight suits, there's no space. You wind up with your left knee bumping into his right one, your side pressed to his through the layers of sweat-wicking fabric and sensors. When he grins at you, lopsided as ever, you sneer."Nostalgic, isn't it?" he says, his voice filtered through the sounds of metal groaning outside. A few klicks from where you're both sitting, a monster the size of a skyscraper is crushing the city underfoot. The parallels aren't lost on you.---Or: The Pacific Rim/Evangelion TomTord Ballroom Dance AU
Relationships: Tom/Tord (Eddsworld)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30





	phosphenes in our starry eyes today

**Author's Note:**

> Some quick notes about the worldbuilding here: 
> 
> While this is ostensibly a Pacific Rim AU and most core aspects of both the jaeger piloting (namely "two pilots mind-meld and move a giant robot through the power of love while viewing each other's minds and thoughts in their entirety") and the concept of the drift have been maintained, this AU also takes a page from Evangelion's book in envisioning what piloting a giant robot with your mind would look like on a mechanical level in the cockpit. 
> 
> Please don't take this seriously, y'all.

When you settle into the jaeger with him, it's a homecoming you never wanted. 

The cockpit is as small as ever-- he'd built it with one body in mind originally, when he'd used it to smash your old life to splinters under his metal fist-- and between your body and his body and your respective flight suits, there's no space. You wind up with your left knee bumping into his right one, your side pressed to his through the layers of sweat-wicking fabric and sensors. When he grins at you, lopsided as ever, you sneer. 

"Nostalgic, isn't it?" he says, his voice filtered through the sounds of metal groaning outside. A few klicks from where you're both sitting, a monster the size of a skyscraper is crushing the city underfoot. The parallels aren't lost on you. 

"Just get it over with," you snap, and he obliges; you lean over to give him access to the plug at the base of your neck and try not to shiver when his mechanical fingers brush your skin. You feel it behind your teeth when the cord hits home. Once you're secured, you reciprocate: he turns his back to you and you wire him up as efficiently as possible. No lingering here. You can't tell if he's disappointed. 

"Ready?" he asks, mocking and sincere in the way that only he can be. Miles away, the kaiju howls. There's the rumble of a distant building collapsing. You really don't have time to stall. 

You stall anyways. "If there was any other option," you say, slowly, "I would never do this with you again." 

"You wound me," he says, tone oblique, shifting against you as he makes himself comfortable in the bucket seat. It's the truth. You can still feel it through the ghost drift when a hurt is strong enough. This one is. 

You don't care. "Do it," you demand, before you can reason your way out of it, and he does: he flips a switch on the center console and the jaeger hums to life around you. The electricity hits your mind and the world bleeds away like watercolor, narrows down to you and him and the points of contact between you. 

\---

The first time you'd entered the drift with him, the space between you hadn't known how to form itself. You'd been told that was a possibility; it takes a high degree of mental synchronicity to create a coherent narrative to your drift. Your first time in the cockpit with Tord had been a maelstrom of sensation and emotion. The jaeger had collapsed in seconds, one massive arm smashing through the reinforced glass of its cockpit while the other tore at the steel of its chest. You'd felt it, felt every agonizing second of it. You'd refracted it through yourself, threw it across your connection and into Tord as he screamed and you screamed and the lines between you melted in a way that never really healed. Sometimes, you still wake up at night with a phantom shattering in your skull. 

The second time, and all of the many times after, were different. 

You'd figured out the problem with your approach. You and Tord weren't built to synchronize. The ways you processed were too different, canceled each other out like radio wave interference. What you could do was function in tandem: balance and counterbalance, muscle pull and anchor. He takes a step forward and you shift the weight on your back foot to keep you both from keeling over. It was instinctive. You'd spent decades in this dance with him. 

What it looked like in the drift was this: when you were in college, one of the graduation requirements for your music degree involved playing forty hours for a campus rec organization. You'd wound up spending most of those working with the competitive ballroom team and something about their practice studio had lodged itself into your mind. When you were there, it was always close to sunset, and the light pooled orange on the polished wood floors. There was a whole wall of mirrors, a small seating area of folded metal chairs, a storage closet in the back where you kept your standup bass. It was a lived-in comfortable, familiar but not familiar enough to have bad memories attached. 

(The first time we entered the drift properly, I didn't recognize this place. It was your memory, and that was enough to have me laughing. I wanted to dig through the closet, sneak out the back door and see what else you remembered out here. Our dorm was, what, a block away? Two? What did you remember from my room, I wondered. Did you know I'd stolen your shirts? And then I thought it, and you knew, and that was enough to have me laughing again.)

He steps out from the shadows wearing his dress blues and a smile. It always sends a chill down your spine to see him here. You don't let it show on your face. Behind him, the mirror reflects nothing. "I've missed this place," he says, and your jaw tics. You're also in uniform, which tells you everything you need to know about how this night will end. Tord always gets what he wants. "It's been far too long." 

(It's been over a year since the last time we're drifted, and it's a homecoming you never wanted. I know this, and I pull you back in anyways. I know this, and still I spent months rebuilding the jaeger after we destroyed it together one, two, three, five, nine times. You knew why I did it the first moment we came here, and I can never take that knowledge back. I can't hide anything from you in your own mind.)

You start the music.

(I step into your rhythm.) 

Outside the window, the jaeger begins to walk. Inside the drift, you and Tord circle each other. The music has always been yours to control, and this evening, it's a waltz; you set your heart to 3/4 time and the piano swells.

(It's a familiar tune, but not to me. I revel in the way that what is yours becomes mine.) 

He's looking at you like he wants to eat you alive. You can feel the tremor in his hands reflected back into your own. He wants to reach out and touch you so badly. He's constrained by the time signature, forced to move slowly. This is how you keep him in check. You hold steady. 

(Yes. God, yes. You can't know how badly I've missed this.) 

You reach out your hand.

(I take it. I let you take the lead. I let you reel me in.) 

You pull him against you, feel the feverish heat of him through several layers of uniform. "Focus," you say, and it comes out hushed. Already, you can feel the edges of his trauma. He's worrying at them like a child with a loose tooth, and you can feel the ripples: biting frost, searing metal, the dull ache of starvation. "Here with me." 

(It builds up like static when you're not around: the stress, the tension. It leaves me sleepless. I've been getting frantic the last few months. I would never say it out loud, but you know and I know and there are no secrets between us here. I touch you and it moves like electricity out of me and into you. It's a relief like no other. I struggle not to fall asleep against you right here: standing in the twilight, heavy in your arms. It's been too long, Tom.)

You take the first step forward, and he steps back in turn. On another level of your consciousness, somewhere behind your eyelids, you see London in flames, your hands NERA-lined and the size of houses. On another level of your consciousness, your hands are your hands and they're around your enemy's waist, nails digging into the wool of his overcoat. On another level of consciousness, (your hands are my hands, my hand and my metal hand, my symmetry broken by your retaliation. Do you regret it? Do you regret what you did to me?) You regret many things, and scarring him is not one.

You waltz.

(The first memory: the day when it all went to Hell. I'd choked on smoke before, but this was unusually bad. I remember this, because all I could think about was how much it hurt to breathe. This is what they don't tell you about losing a limb: it's anguish, but mostly it's numb; you spend your life used to feeling two arms, and when you feel only one the shock is worse than the pain. This is what they don't tell you about losing an eye: the world loses its dimensionality, flattens in a way that would be poetic if it didn't give me decades of migraines. The smoke hurt the most, burned my throat, convinced me I was dying as I hit free fall. I thought I would die in agony. I thought I would die alone.)

You feel it echoing through your body as you dance: your chest tightens, your airway threatens to close, your skin jolts like you touched a stovetop. You're used to this by now-- this is always the first memory Tord brings into the drift with you. It's tied up inextricably with your own; you feel the way the muscles of his normal arm twitch when he feels the shrapnel hit you. Outside the window, the sounds of teenagers on bikes and the screams of innocents filter in. Tord's following you on muscle memory alone. His eye's unfocused; he's already somewhere else, needs you to reel him back in. 

(The second memory: farther back, an older one. College. I was coming off a bender on... Something, it's not important what.) It was pills. (It was pills. I was on top of the world until I wasn't; my body gave out on me when my mind did, left me shuddering and nauseous and sweating. It wasn't just the pills-- it was the lack of eating, it was the skipping sleep. It was the caffeine overdose. I thought I was going to shake out of my own skin, alone in the bathroom with my head pressed to the porcelain of the toilet seat to try and keep cool. I was crying. I thought I would die there. I thought it might be better if I did.) 

This is a difficult memory, and not just for him. You remembered finding him there, the way he'd gone from his usual jagged mania to uncomfortably close to human. You'd brought him a water bottle, waited for him to finish puking. You'd wanted to rub his back, maybe, and tell him something bland and reassuring. You hadn't. You just crouched with him on the damp tile of the student union bathroom and waited for the retching to end. (Some things never change.) In the dance studio, he's shed his jacket already. You've established a sway with him, body pressed to body, steps in perfect time. 

(The third memory: even father back, the sensation of it worn smooth like the edges of an old photograph.) You almost miss a beat. Not this one. God, not this one. (The first time I'd ever been shot. Twelve years old, face in the brown grass, lying in the dirt and bleeding and not screaming when the flies settled in. My shoulder felt like burning, like ash in my lungs, every nerve alive where it was severed.) You know the feeling well. (I choked back bile. I wanted to scream, knew if I did that he'd find me. There were footsteps. I could hear them over my hyperventilating. I was breathing so fast.) "Here with me, Tord." (So fast. I was terrified, kept biting harder and harder on my tongue. Split it open.) "Focus on me." (The taste of my blood melting on my tongue. I thought I would die there, Tom. I thought my father would kill me.) 

You taste his blood on your lips. On another level, there is a spear the length of a battleship in your hands. You tip him, let his weight fall towards the floor. (It's so heavy. The memory of it weighs me down. I fall into the motion. The spear arcs from our hands.) Catch him at the very last second. You refuse to shake. You stay steady for him. (Let me put it down. Let me curl up inside you and leave the weight here.) You reel him in: balance and counterbalance. Outside of yourself, the jaeger doesn't stumble. You catch a glimpse of Tord in the dance studio mirror and he looks uncomfortably young: wild-eyed, his hair full of twigs. In the mirror, you think he's crying.

You've shed your coat as well. He rumples the fabric of your shirt when he digs his fingertips into your hip. Smooths it out when he relaxes. You keep the beat even as you let his fear chill you. (Always so steady, always the rhythm to my melody. I used to fall asleep to your heartbeat, soft and slow, and we'd pretend to hate each other in the mornings.) 

You remember the first time he'd shown you that particular piece of himself, the terrified, prey-animal one. How you'd left the drift shuddering like you'd been electrocuted, kept rubbing compulsively at the scar on your own shoulder for days afterwards. You'd seen Tord in the Red Army base, in the hangar with his hair tied up and his arms covered in grease up to the elbows, in the mess hall with the new recruits. You'd wanted to shake him. (You looked like you hadn't slept in days. I felt your fatigue through the remnants of our connection. Do you know how much better I slept, knowing that you knew? That someone finally understood?) You'd wanted to corner him and demand to know how he could function with the constant dread, how the hell he could expect you to do the same. (You were enraged, with me or on my behalf, I couldn't tell. I doubted you could. Always my bodyguard. Always my damnation. There's never been a difference when it comes to you.) You'd slammed him against the wall, started shouting at him. (You were shaking with it.) How dare he. How dare he leave you with this terrible fucking awareness of him. (Not pity, I never wanted your pity and you knew that. Just your understanding. Just somewhere to put this down.)

Now, you see yourself in the mirror when your steps spin you around: horns, violet scales, too-sharp teeth. Tord, naked from the waist up and bloody in your arms. The wood of the studio floor creaks underneath you like it wants to give out. (Your turn now, Thomas. Make me feel you.) Somewhere, there's the sounds of a monster roaring, of steel caving in. Here, you're digging your nails into Tord's hoodie. (Let me in. Show me your everything.) 

(Tell me about Vienna.)

The music stops. In the mirror, he's one-armed, half his hair singed off, bleeding, smoke curling from his nostrils. In your arms, he's giving you a brilliant smile. In the silence, you can hear when his breathing hitches. 

(Come on, Thomas. You said it yourself.) The floor is tilting under you. Balance and counterbalance and now you've got neither. (I always get what I want.) He's stripping off his hoodie, leaving himself in just an undershirt. (Don't make me beg. I'll do it. You know I will.) 

It clicks into place all at once. "You did that on purpose," you breathe, and (I hear the disgust in your tone. The loathing. It hurts, God,) it hurts. "The memory of your father." (More than that. The monster, too.) "What the fuck are you playing at, Tord?" 

(Like you don't know. Like you don't know what I need from you.)

With a screech of bowstrings, the music is back with a vengeance. 3/8ths time, a crowbar modulation up from before. You step forward, and he steps back. You step forward again, again. He keep retreating. On another level, you both catch yourselves before you stumble. On this one, you're baring your teeth at him. (Better to beg forgiveness. It looks like I'm begging anyways.) You grab him by the mechanical arm and throw him into a spin, drag him back into you. When he makes contact again, (chest to chest, heart to heart,) the deluge of memories is yours. 

This time, it's your memories that you're slamming into his mind. (I'll take it, I'll take anything you can throw at me. Anything you'll give to me.) All of the hurt parts, all of the suffering: the feeling of the seatbelt digging into your neck when you were four years old and your father crashed the car, the first time you'd gotten beat up behind the middle school and your nose wouldn't stop bleeding, the first time Tord had kissed you. (I'm not sorry.) How it felt to turn into a monster the first time, your skin flaying itself open like paper while you sobbed. The first time you got into a fight with Edd, a real fight, over your drinking, the kind that had you convinced he'd be ditching you the way everyone else had. The brutalizing shame of the rehab talks, of Matt resting his hand on yours when you got so pissed that you'd cried. Recollection after recollection after recollection, one-two-three, one-two-three. The emptiness when Tord left you, the rage you'd kept alive and burning about it for years, the hole you punched in your bedroom wall about him. The day he came back, how angry you were with yourself over your relief. How much you hated yourself when you agreed to go with him: into the Army and into the Jaeger and into his bed, giving up piece after piece of yourself to try and fill the void inside of him. He's insatiable. He'll eat your heart out because (please, no,) he's never had one of his own. 

"Is this what you wanted," you breathe, directly into his ear. On another level, you are holding the throat of a beast in your hand (and you are squeezing the life out). You'd lost your hoodie, too, and now you're shirtless and he's shirtless and his skin is flushing bright red. Anger or shame, you can't tell. (This isn't what I wanted.) He's flinching. (You're viciously satisfied.) You take another step, and he is forced to step back or fall. (I step back.) "To force it out of me?" 

(It hurts, Tom.) 

You dip him again, (tear out the monster's heart,) and pull him back into your arms. 

"You did this, didn't you," you whisper, (as the city falls silent around us, the kaiju vanquished,) just the two of you and the music and your heavy breathing. It feels like you've run a marathon. (It feels like it's been a lifetime.) He's heavy in your arms. 

(So what if I did. So what if I took to my lab to make a monster, so what if I set it loose on London. So what if I spent hours waiting for it to do sufficient damage so I could justify calling you in again, when I know you never wanted to hear from me again.) He's shaking. The sunset is bathing his shoulders in gold. Memories are filtering through, unbidden: waking up next to him, after he'd crawled in your bedroom window. High school, the way he'd laughed when he'd get close to crashing his dirtbike into your car, manic and gleeful. Him, leaning up against your shoulder late at night while you watched TV and pretended not to notice. 

(It's a homecoming for me, this place. This room inside your mind.) You're swaying with him, despite yourself. Balance and counterbalance, the music slowly stilling. (Your arms, this dance. You.) Maybe you're shaking, too. (A homecoming you never wanted.) He wasn't supposed to build a home inside you. (I needed you to let me in.) You're looking down at him, half-naked and barefoot in your arms, and he's looking out the window. (You can hate me, if you want.) You hate him. (Fine. Fine, that's your right, I'm sure I've earned it. I know I've earned it. Hurt me all you want.) 

You and him, alone together in the quiet. His forehead on your shoulder, his arms around your waist, the sunlight fading in his hair.

(Just don't let me go.) 

\---

(When I exit the drift, I pull the cord out from my neck and feel the way your mind clicks shut, like a door locking. You're sitting as far away from me as you possibly can in the cockpit, and I know that you can still feel my hurt, even with all of your walls firmly back in place. I didn't get what I wanted.)

("Please," you say, voice rough with some emotion that I can't read from outside of you, "Tord. Don't do that again.")

("Don't do what?" I ask, and I am grinning, and my heart is fragile in my chest. It's almost a genuine question: do you mean the making a monster, or drifting with you, or trying to drag Vienna out of you, inch by inch, until I can cup the memory of it in my hands like a dying bird and remember why we do this to each other. It's almost genuine, because the answer doesn't matter.)

(Because I know that you know that I know that I'll do it again. That I'll keep doing it, again and again, until one of us dies or I finally get what I want. That I'll keep pulling you back down with me, keep retreating to the room you store deep inside yourself, keep reeling you back in until you're holding me in your arms. That we'll keep waking up in this cockpit, knees bumping together, your side pressed to mine, looking out the jaeger window at the path of destruction we've carved out of the world.)

(This isn't what I wanted, but it doesn't matter. I'm never letting you go.) 

\---

After you get back to the Red Army base, after you shrug his hand off your shoulder when he tries to touch you and make conversation, after you've retreated to your room, your real room, the one that isn't a block away from a dorm that you just crushed under hundreds of tons of steel and scale, after you've locked the door so he can't follow, after you've spent so long in the shower that all the hot water's run out, after you've crawled into bed, exhausted beyond measure, after you've checked and rechecked your mind for traces of him lingering and come up empty, after you've sighed and accepted defeat and dragged your hand down your face and closed your eyes, you finally let yourself think about Vienna. 

\---

... It was college. You still weren't admitting what happened between the two of you, still thought you hated him. Maybe hated him for real, but in the less complicated way. You'd have decades to confuse love and loathing later, decades to add betrayal to the mix. This isn't there yet.

This is two dumb teenagers finding two very cheap flights to another country for a long weekend. This is you and him, cramped in a tiny plane three rows apart and breathing the same recirculated air. This is jetlag, stumbling through the streets in a city where you're both equally alone. This is you bumming a cigar off him as you sit on the curb waiting for a cab. This is your shoulders pressed together while he keels over, too tired to keep up the facade. 

Three days. Three days of sharing a small bed on a creaky steel bedframe with heathered sheets, of wandering around ancient buildings. Three nights of not sleeping, just lying on top of each other, forehead to forehead. No one knows you here, so you're allowed to wrap your arm around his waist while you wander. On the second day, you steal his scarf and neither of you mention it. You watch the sunset through the window, drink a lot of wine. It aches. It's the kind of weekend that makes you shut your mouth and savor it, because you know that you'll be thinking back on it for the rest of your life. There isn't anything else to say.

The return flight has you sitting next to each other, fingers twined until the plane touches down in London and he's shoving you into the aisle, complaining that you're taking too long to get his bags, and the spell is broken, and you think, _it'll never be that good again._

And maybe that hurts, and maybe that's a hurt you'll never get past. And maybe you'll revisit these memory often, maybe too often-- the warmth of him against you under the comforter, the way his brow crinkled when he tried to read the street signs, the lines of his back when he's wearing your jacket. And maybe you're right, and it never is that kind of uncomplicated good again, because the two of you lost the privilege of uncomplicated after the murder attempts. 

So when he unleashes a monstrosity and levels a city to battering-ram his way into your mind again, looking for some kind of solace, when he forces each of his traumas into your unwilling arms, when he needles and cajoles and drags the vulnerability out of you, here's what you have left for him: you've got mosaic rooftops and airport whiskey and bumming a light off an old woman you don't share a common tongue with and snowflakes in your eyelashes and dusty sunlight in a room you couldn't find your way back to if you tried, in a city that's not yours to know. 

And what you want to say is, _Here, fucking take it. Take the one good thing I've buried all the way down. Take the thing I can't have, take the thing I know better than to ever want. Take the dream I gave up on but never gave up on enough. Force it out of me, go on, do it, it's all we know how to do. I spent all these years praying for you to just ask. All you ever had to do was reach out your hand._

_And you didn't, because you couldn't. Because neither of us know how to do anything but push. And now we're here, and now we'll never have it, and I hope you go to your grave with this memory weighing you down._

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written and it was an _experience_ to cobble together, even if I'm not 100% satisfied with the pacing on the outcome. Sorry for the delays on TTB; I promise it's still getting done! Grad school applications and exams have just been taking up most of my free time. 
> 
> Shoutouts as always go to the inimitable @jinxedlucky for introducing me to Pacific Rim in the first place, to Kaiya for once again reading all of my bullshit as it gets drafted, and to Di for hitting me with this idea in the first place! 
> 
> If y'all see me publishing WWE fic after this, please slap me.


End file.
